@BarackObama Barack Obama
Welcome to a new @BarackObama. From now on, #Obama2012 staff will manage this account; tweets from the President will be signed "-BO."
The President's Twitter account has been turned over to the Obama campaign and that has been noted publicly.
For POLITICO, Burgess Everett 'reported' on the change. 'Reported'? Try parroted, try missed the whole damn point.
We know the whole damn point because we raised the issue weeks ago.
May 29th, we published "Has the White House broken the Hatch Act?" and it opened:
Is Twitter campaigning? It's a question the FEC might want to probe. Barack Obama has a Twitter feed. No we're not a sitcom actor or Arianna Huffington -- meaning we're not stupid enough to have ever believed Barack Obama does his own Tweets. So when the news broke in November 2009 (here for Marshall Kirkpatrick reporting it at Readwriteweb.com) that Barack had declared in a townhall that "I have never used Twitter," we weren't at all surprised. But the Twitter feed, started after Barack became President of the United States, has managed to fool 8,309,213 people -- or help the fools delude themselves -- that he Tweets. The White House has used the feed to communicate to citizens. But, uh-oh, you gotta' draw a line between government service and campaigning.
Get it? White House lawyers did.
We advised, "First off, no more Barack Obama pretense. Now that the Twitter feed is being used as a campaign tool, the American people need to know who is writing the Tweets to ensure that the Tweets are not being written on the tax payer's bill or at the federal workplace."
Have you checked out the top of the Twitter feed? "This account is run by "Obama2012 campaign staff. Tweets from the President are signed - BO."
We saw the problem. We caught the story weeks before POLITICO stumbled over it, clomping in clown shoes and misinterpreting everything.